POLICE WORK GOES Behind the Smoke Gun

Big Brother — with a Badge

In the early morning hours of last Sept. 25, a stocky young man bolted the Bora Bora Lounge in Highbridge, the Bronx, with a gun in his hand and squeezed off seven shots. 

His target fell dead on the street as the shooter fled into the darkness, leaving little behind for police save a nearly useless description: “Unknown male Hispanic in 20s.” 

Enter Big Brother — with a badge. 

With the aid of surveillance video at the club and facial recognition technology, cops tracked down a suspect and made an arrest. 

To solve a Bronx street shooting in 21st century New York — and most other crimes committed citywide — the NYPD now employs a wide variety of high-tech tools and massive databases of information culled from an incredible array of sources. 

 

The NYPD recently provided the Daily News with an unprecedented look at its 21st century arsenal, which includes: 

• Thousands of security cameras scattered throughout the city linked together in a network called the Domain Awareness System (DAS). 

• Records of hundreds of thousands of license plate numbers scanned and pinned to specific locations at specific times. 

• Social media posts bragging about criminal behavior. 

• Facial recognition technology that matches facial characteristics of potential suspects to images in a massive NYPD database. 

• Improved ballistics capability that allows cops to quickly identify the source of a bullet. 

• Prosecutors in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island have created crime strategies units, using data to identify ties between crimes. Authorities can also map the crime to spot trends, quality of life issues or gang activity. 

• A system of sensors the NYPD plans to install that would detect gunshots — even when residents don’t report the shootings. Cops can then sync the sensors with cameras to capture footage of the crime. 

• Last week, a select group of cops answered calls with Microsoft tablet computers in hand that can instantly tap into the criminal history at an address — including residents with outstanding warrants. 

“There’s nothing that technology doesn’t play a huge role in today,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller told The News. 

Of course, the nation’s biggest police department continues to rely on the usual methods to crack cases — canvassing for witnesses, working informants, relying on analysis of ballistics, fingerprints and autopsy reports. 

 

But year by year, the NYPD has embraced the latest technology, starting perhaps most notably in 1994 with the advent of CompStat — precinct-by-precinct computerized analysis of nitty-gritty crime stats used to strategically target police activity. Bratton — who first introduced CompStat with the late Jack Maple — said current technology augments traditional police work in ways that he wouldn’t have thought possible in the ’90s. 

“Every shell case and every piece of ballistic evidence we get, we’re going to have the ability to analyze that in a very quick, timely fashion,” Bratton said. 

He recounted a recent CompStat session where bullet cartridges found at several crime scenes over the prior two months were matched to one gun. Surveillance cameras at multiple crime scenes revealed the same vehicle present at each scene. From there they tied the vehicle to an owner, and soon enough to a suspect. 

All types of technology are now in play. In the last few years, the NYPD has discussed the introduction of infrared technology that can detect weapons on a person. They also bought two pairs of Google glasses — as yet unused. 

The department also has set aside $1.5 million for a sound sensor system called Shotspot that captures gunshots at specific locations. That allows police to respond to shots even if no one calls 911. 

The gunshot system has been used in Milwaukee, Oakland, Calif., and Yonkers. In 2011, the department launched a pilot program in Brownsville, Brooklyn, that was never expanded. The technology has since improved and is now considered much more reliable. 

The age of social media provided police with another crimefighting tool — tracking criminals as they brag about their misdeeds on Facebook or Twitter. 

“You do a keyword search on ‘capped him,’ ‘shot him,’ ‘popped him’ and you bring up those pages that refer to those things that are . . . the slang words for a shooting,” said Miller, the NYPD’s counterterrorism chief.